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I have customized text editing bindings in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict but they all stopped working in TextEdit.app when I upgraded to Lion. They still work fine in other Cocoa apps like Safari.

The system default bindings like ^F for moveForward: work as usual.

Has anyone else who uses DefaultKeyBinding.dict noticed this? Is there a way to fix it or any other way of customizing the key bindings in TextEdit?

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The custom keybindings work normally for me in TextEdit. Have you tried replacing your DefaultKeyBinding.dict with something like {"a"=(insertText:,"test");}? – Lauri Ranta Jun 7 '12 at 0:46
@LauriRanta thanks; knowing that I was the only one with the problem got me to finally investigate it properly. – mckeed Jun 7 '12 at 14:40

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

The problem was that I had moved the actual DefaultKeyBinding.dict file somewhere else for version-control purposes and symlinked to it.

Most apps were loading the file through the symlink, but TextEdit (and, it turns out, a couple other apps that I thought just didn't support key bindings) must do something different and didn't see it.

So, oops, lesson learned. Don't symlink your system configuration files.

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